Youth Crisis Center The Safe Place

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“Jacksonville's nationally recognized Youth Crisis Center and its newest initiative, Touchstone Village, is one of the most important advancements for a population of young people who have been overlooked too long --- 18 year olds with significant emotional distress during childhood moving out of state care without a family support system, and often without a high school degree or employment skills. We desperately need a better launching pad for these youth”.

Youth Crisis Center is a remarkable success story about changed lives and reunited families. In 1974, Gwen Yates, former Jacksonville City Councilwoman, founded YCC as Florida's first runaway youth shelter. YCC soon emerged as Florida's busiest runaway program, and it is now one of the busiest in the country, housing more than 1,600 youth each year. In 1975, the CBS crew of 60 Minutes identified our organization as an exemplary program worthy of being highlighted on their Sunday evening broadcast.

Submitted by Tonyaa Weathersbee on June 22, 2010 — 11:26pm Tonyaa Weathersbee's Blog
When Mikessia and Dimesha were born, their mother welcomed them into the world with unique names. Too bad she wasn't able to stick around to help them navigate their way through it. When the girls were toddlers, their mother became so drug—addled that the state removed them from her home. From that point on through their teen years, they lived with a string of relatives - and a lot of anger and uncertainty. "Since I was a baby, it's like everything hasn't fallen in the right place," said Dimesha, who is now 16. "My dad died, and my mother has been on drugs her whole life ... I lived with my aunt, but I started acting out ..." But these days Dimesha and her sister, who is 17, are working to find their way in a world that other adults were unable to shepherd them through, and one in which most foster children become adrift. And they're doing it through the help of Touchstone Village, a program that provides transitional housing for youths ages 16 to 21. These are youths like Dimesha and Mikessia; youths who have never known the stability of a permanent home as children and who, without help, won't know how to create one for themselves once they are too old for foster care. During a recent luncheon at Touchstone Village, guests listened to the sisters' story and toured the complex. Twenty apartments and a group home comprise the village off Parental Home Road on Jacksonville's Southside. Youths who live there are taught the things they need to know to survive on their own; the things that a parent would normally teach them. Among other things, they are taught how to properly clean their apartments, and how to manage money and pay bills, as well as shop and cook. Many of them have jobs — Mikessia works at a McDonald's — and they learn good work habits and other life skills. Touchstone Village couldn't have opened at a more crucial time. According to a study published by the National Foster Care Month Partnership, the number of children who age-out of foster care has ballooned from 19,000 in 1999 to nearly 30,000 in 2008. What that means is that for years, thousands of children have been shunted from home to home, with the priority being that their basic needs — a safe place to live and food to eat - are met. Once those foster children turn 18, they are turned out on the streets with virtually no clue as to how to survive. As a result, more than one in five wind up homeless. "They're [former foster children] really the new homeless population," said Tom Patania, president of Youth Crisis Center Foundation, which also oversees Touchstone Village. On top of that, one in four will wind up in jail or prison after two years of leaving the system. This situation, however, shouldn't surprise anyone. If children have only known disruption most of their lives, it's impossible to expect them to be able to build a stable life when they have no clue as to what that looks like. And with so many children either moving from foster home to foster home, or from relative to relative - chances are they've been so busy trying to survive that they haven't learned how to drive, or have a checking account, or how to handle basic adult tasks. That's why Touchstone Village is needed - and it needs help. It needs gift card donations, mentors, twin bed ensembles and donations of dependable vehicles. But what's also needed is for everyone to examine ways to dismantle the drug culture and the community dysfunction that causes youths like Mikessia and Dimesha to have to depend on strangers to teach them what every kid, ideally, ought to be able to learn at home.